Game Industry

Destructive Imbalance: The Need for Game Developers to Organize

Here we go again.  Last week, the game industry was rocked by 800 layoffs at Epic Games, nearly 16% of their total workforce. The announcement is just the latest in a string of “reductions in force” across the game industry – Striking Distance, Relic, Amazon, and Probably Monsters among them. I can’t remember a more …

Destructive Imbalance: The Need for Game Developers to Organize Read More »

Equal Measures Tragic and Creepy: A Starfield Love Story

Warning: spoilers for the midgame of Starfield, including some companion details. The first game I can remember playing where I cared about a player-centered romance storyline was Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn. The romanceable companions each had a deep storyline that ran in parallel with the main plot. Though there were a few …

Equal Measures Tragic and Creepy: A Starfield Love Story Read More »

Climbing High: A Tortured Metaphor for Game Development

There’s an analogy I like for game development that I’m fond of stretching beyond plausibility to make a point. I first used my favorite metaphor years ago when I started blogging, and I’ve been itching to expand on my original premise ever since. For as many years as I’ve been in the game industry, I’ve …

Climbing High: A Tortured Metaphor for Game Development Read More »

Feed the Machine: The Future of Remote Work

My son started eighth grade in the Texas public school system last week – trudging to the bus with an overladen backpack on a muggy August morning, returning in the afternoon’s 100-degree heat exhausted and overwhelmed. My son is a great student. He’s rules-bound, focused, and more concerned about his grades and pleasing his teachers …

Feed the Machine: The Future of Remote Work Read More »

The Familiar and the New: Design Takeaways from Baldur’s Gate 3

I can’t help myself – I have to spend another week’s worth of digital ink on Baldur’s Gate 3.  (This blog is spoiler-free, minus whatever the screenshots give away.) After 25 hours of play with the full version, I’m confident in saying Baldur’s Gate 3 is the masterpiece the hype suggested it would be. So …

The Familiar and the New: Design Takeaways from Baldur’s Gate 3 Read More »

Barriers Tumbling: AI and the Future of Game Development

My stepfather is one of the smartest people I know – an engineer and a mathematician, a polyglot descendent of a Scottish poet, and a whiz with computers long before they were in every household. I’ve written before about how he first introduced me to games; to no small extent, I owe my career to …

Barriers Tumbling: AI and the Future of Game Development Read More »

Good Game Development: Thou Wouldst Be Great

In the last two weeks, a Baldur’s Gate 3 “controversy” was sparked by a July 8 Twitter thread written by the head of Strange Scaffold, Xalavier Nelson Jr.  In the thread, he expressed concern about players expecting Baldur’s Gate 3 to set a new standard for RPGs. The suggestion, somewhat clumsily stated, was that Larian …

Good Game Development: Thou Wouldst Be Great Read More »